All posts tagged Roosevelt Island

Cornell University’s fledgling technology campus on Roosevelt Island is expected to get a major boost with the announcement Monday of a $133 million donation by Qualcomm Inc. founder Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan.

The gift allows the school to move forward with a new interdisciplinary center offering a two-year dual degree program in information sciences specializing in connective media, healthier living or the built environment. The facility will be dubbed the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.

The gift is expected to be announced at a press conference at City Hall on Monday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials, and the program is set to launch in the fall of 2014. Read More »

A 1,000-lb. bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island

A park memorializing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dedicated Wednesday on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, almost four decades after it was first planned.

The park was designed in 1973 by famed architect Louis I. Kahn, but Kahn’s untimely death in 1974 and New York City’s brush with bankruptcy in 1975 delayed the project indefinitely. In 2006, former United Nations Ambassador William vanden Heuvel announced plans to raise the funds necessary to build the park through the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and two years later a conservancy was established to help raise the rest of the funds for its completion.

President Roosevelt first articulated his idea of the ‘four freedoms’ he considered universal human rights in his Jan. 6, 1941, State of the Union address, as Europe and Asia engaged in World War II. The four freedoms Roosevelt enumerated were freedom of speech, religion, from want and from fear. Read More »

Former President Bill Clinton, left, greets visitors Wednesday during the opening ceremony of a park to honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Former President Bill Clinton, speaking at a ceremony Wednesday to dedicate a monument to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, discussed the terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya and defended Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of the situation.

The attack on the consulate and statements by the Obama administration in the days after have become a highly contested issue, with reverberations felt in the presidential campaign. Both President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney addressed the consulate attack again during Tuesday night’s debate.

Mr. Clinton on Wednesday dismissed critics who have accused the Obama administration of bungling the investigation into the attack.

“I think if you look at the committee [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] appointed to look into this, nobody thinks they’re going to whitewash anything,” he said. “Those people are genuine heavyweights, they will look into it, they will tell us what happened, what went wrong and what we should do now, and I think we should wait to see what they say.” Read More »

Cornell University has appointed its first dean to lead its new engineering and technology school on Roosevelt Island, college officials announced Thursday.

Daniel Huttenlocher, who previously served as the dean of computing and information science at Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, N.Y., will oversee the new school as it prepares for the multi-year process of building its planned two-million-square-foot outpost in New York City.

In December, the Bloomberg administration selected the joint bid between Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build the Roosevelt Island campus. The city will contribute $100 million toward the campus and 11 acres of public land. Read More »

Main Street on Roosevelt Island. Stanford University indicated its interest in building a campus on the island.

Stanford University has its eye on a potential Roosevelt Island campus.

Late last year, New York City put out a call to academic institutions throughout the world seeking a top-tier applied-science facility to be built here. By March, some 18 schools had submitted proposals. Details remained vague, but city officials had identified a handful of city-owned sites as potential locations. Roosevelt Island was on the list.

“It is a unique place, mainly used for housing, hospitals and recreation,” said Bob Reidy, Stanford’s vice president of land, buildings and real estates. “It is a special place in that it’s oddly apart from the city, but very closely adjacent.” Read More »

Dominating the local skyline with its stainless steel digester “eggs,” Newtown Creek is the largest of New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants. See more photos.

If you’ve ever contemplated the fate of your discarded leftovers or the trajectory of your toilet water, some of the tours offered this weekend as part of Open House New York can help lay your curiosity to rest.

As part of the annual event, which throws open the doors to nearly 200 normally off-limits sites across all five boroughs, the city is opening several waste facilities rarely seen by the public.

The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood will offer nature walks along the (heavily polluted) creek, a tour of its visitor center and an opportunity to see the facility from the top of its 130-foot high digester “eggs” — with sweeping, 360-degree views of the area. While touring the plant, visitors will learn all the dirty details on how wastewater from the city’s toilets, drains and sewage are processed.

“Before digestion, it smells pretty bad,” said Vincent Sapienza, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Waste Water Treatment Bureau. “After digestion, it’s not that bad.” Read More »

Billy Dash changes the oil in one of the Roosevelt Island trash system’s six turbines.

Hidden below ground and between the 16 apartment buildings on Roosevelt Island is a system of pneumatic tubes that propels household waste at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. It’s a futuristic solution to the urban problem of trash collection, a grandiose and somewhat elegant advance over the fleet of unsightly sanitation trucks trolling city streets today.

“Everyone kind of grabs on to the quirky Jetsons side of it,” says Juliette Spertus, an architect who spent two years researching the system. “People assume it’s a relic and not an answer for the future.” Her research is on display at the “Fast Trash!” exhibit at a gallery on Roosevelt Island.

The system certainly is a relic. It was built 35 years ago during a period that saw city and state governments involved in Utopian projects to remake what was then called Welfare Island. According to Spertus, the system was designed with a 40-year lifespan.

Most island resident are scarcely aware that the system exists, according to Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.